Never forget: the truth is the gallant Joe McCarthy was right

Myths survive not because they’re true but because they satisfy a social need. Perhaps no myth so infuses popular Anglophone culture today as the “Red Scare”, a confected hysteria that was the work of an irresponsible Irish-American drunkard named Senator Joe McCarthy. The result? Artistic freedom was catastrophically limited by an insane and unjustified witch hunt of the US Left after the Second World War. 

Or so the myth goes. 

A Financial Times review of the latest exhibition in the New York Historical Museum about the evils of anti-communism is, naturally, headlined “McCarthyism: A sobering show …revisits the paranoia and repression of the Red Scare,” yes, complete with the villain’s name in red letters. The review outlined the evils inflicted on Hollywood by the dreadful House Un-American Activities Committee. 

Except, of course, HUAC had nothing to do with Senator Joe McCarthy. The clue, children, is in the name, He was a member of the Upper House, the Senate: the hearings were in the Lower House, hence the name, HUAC. This was formed before the Second World War, its duty to oppose both Nazism and Communism. So: Would HUAC’s pursuit of Nazi stooges in Hollywood be the subject today of an indignant exhibition in New York’s history museum? Too hard? OK – is Barack Obama a Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan? Still too hard? Tip, the answer is like Japanese theatre: “Noh”.

In 1939, there could be little doubt as to which of the two -isms was the bloodier: Communism had already murdered Russian democracy at birth, and with the Civil War, the purges and the man-made famines Russia and in Ukraine, had been responsible for at least  five million deaths. At that point, the Nazis probably accounted for a few thousand, though by the end of the war, a genocide headcount would be impossible, not least because so many of the killings were joyously collaborative. It became easier thereafter, because whereas Nazism perished in 1945,  communism triumphed militarily and politically in China initially, to be followed by Korea and later Indo-China, while the glories of Marxian freedom flourished culturally, especially in the US. 

Only decisive political action could prevent a deep communist-led decay there, and this came, separately, in campaigns by HUAC and by the one-man band, the gallant Senator Joe McCarthy. Yet he became one of the most unjustly vilified men in American history, even though his accusations were largely correct. Communists had indeed penetrated the State Department as he alleged, for which crime, the usual cast – or should that be caste? – of liberal fools set about destroying him.  

So naturally, who is applauded today in the USA – the defenders of the US or its enemies? The latter, naturally, for the exhibition shows uniformed American policemen placing their hands over the eyes, mouth and ears of three average Americans – though  this was precisely the objective of the Communists whom the New York museum now lauds as paragons of freedom.   

The real story – of how communist conspiracies within both the US government and Hollywood – were defeated and freedom triumphed is worth a huge celebratory exhibition. Instead, the real enemies of freedom – most particularly the Hollywood Ten (in fact Nine: one swapped sides) – have become, in this Orwellian perversion of truth, the heroic and artistically creative and – most of all – the  innocent victims of a Blacklist that did terrible damage to US culture.

The real story is far more fascinating and far, far more terrible. Within the heart of US government machinery sat the master spy: Nathan Gregory Silvermaster, born in  Russia and raised in China before moving to the US, speaking thereafter with a perfect upper class English accent. In other words, the perfect film-villain. When in 1941 he sought a transfer from the Department of  Agriculture to the Economic Warfare section in Washington, the US military raised objections: Who was this mystery-patrician, seeking admittance to the very decision-making heart of the war-effort against both Japan and Germany? 

Two of the most respected men in Washington, Harry Dexter White, later to negotiate the Bretton Woods Agreement that reshaped the world’s financial architecture (and nearly bankrupted Britain) and Lauchlin Currie, the Canadian-born economist and chief financial adviser to President Roosevelt, gave cast-iron guarantees as to Silvermaster’s pedigree and integrity. There could not be a more authoritative yet more valueless vindication: Both were Soviet Agents. 

He got the job, and access to the crown jewels of intelligence. It was a strategic catastrophe for the USA. Meanwhile, across the US and UK, other communist agents were perverting military and political objectives to suit Stalin’s needs. No-one can say how many good patriots in many countries died because of their ruthless machinations: Thousands at least, probably many multiples thereof. 

In Hollywood, other agents had comprehensively penetrated the film industry. These were the real “thought police”, but their project was stunted by HUAC. Contrary to the museum’s teary assertions about their “ruined lives”, most – avowed communists all – remained within the film industry. Some operated incognito: Dalton Trumbo wrote eighteen film scripts in just two years, using a pen-name, and earning €1,750 a time. Films written by some of the “excluded” Hollywood Nine include Exodus, Spartacus, Cry the Beloved Country, Cincinnati Kid and The Robe. Some writers moved to Britain, where they revolutionised television with series such as The Adventures of Robin Hood,  The Adventures of Sir Lancelot, and The Buccaneers, all produced by the avowed American communist Hannah Weinstein. She later returned to the US to make Stir Crazy and Greased Lightning. 

So, this was not the Gulag Archipelago, and only a left-liberal addiction to fictive self-pity would maintain otherwise. 

McCarthy’s rubric-presence in the museum’s headline neatly summarises the mythic evil he still represents within western culture – the ubiquitous, uncouth civilisation-wrecking far-right bogeyman.  There is still  no more damning, damnable epithet within the artistic world than “McCarthyite”, whereas who knows the name Silvermaster, perhaps the most sinister man in US history? 

Why this disparity? Because intrinsic to western culture is the belief that leftists who proclaim their believe in “equality” are morally superior to those who either do not accept or understand “equality” as a practicable concept. This division is clear, as is the following. No injustice was done to Ten (-1) compared to the injustice of the communist tyranny that was inflicted on hundreds of millions of people, which the Nine unapologetically supported. Their equivalent in the USSR would have suffered months of torture followed by a 9mm Makarov round into the occipital bone behind the ear.  

Communism has mutated since its formal collapse in 1989 into different and very effective forms, and all malignant: Into Black Lives Matter, into organised anti-Semitism in alliance with its strange stablemate, Islamism; into hyper-environmentalism in the UE and US, often subsidised by the Communist Party of China, a perverse mirror-image of the anti-democratic agenda that was pursued by the USSR’s support of the Hollywood Nine and their allies. Moreover, Chinese communism’s latest iteration has created defined economic goals to be pursued by state-authorised privately-owned semi-monopolies operating  within a clear and ruthless strategy. We may call this Protocol 21, Lenin’s New Economic Policy of 1921, now being repurposed for the 21st Century, its objective being the creation of Chinese-controlled roadblocks across the supply-chains feeding the economies of the western world. 

This was a masterstroke of high degree, worthy of the master of such matters, the chess-master and strategist, Nathan Gregory Silvermaster himself.

Some seventy or so years after the “witch-hunt” against enemy agents in Hollywood, and its subsequent misrepresentation by the liberal media, the template of leftist-falsehood endures. In Finland,  the Christian Democrat MP Päivi Räsänen faces criminal charges because she dissents from the Lutheran Church endorsement of  the Pride movement, quoting the Bible as her moral authority. In Germany, armed police recently raided 170 addresses believed to be the source of “hate-messages”, the vast majority from the “far right.” In Britain, the rule of law virtually no longer exists for environmentalists, Islamists and “anti-racists”. The same is true in France, where a Green MP Lisa Bellucho recently declared, “If Greens don’t like a  project, it is legitimate for environmentalists to resort to sabotage.”

Almost the sole exception  to this appalling litany has been the Czech Republic, which is hardly encouraging, for it prohibits the “establishment, support and promotion of a movement aimed at suppressing human rights and freedoms”, including those that promoted “racial, ethnic, national, religious or class resentment”. So why should people not be allowed to support or promote any such movements – also known as “freedom”? 

Though we all know which ones are most likely to be pursued and penalised. Still, we may comfort ourselves with the knowledge that if by some mysterious quirk of jurisprudence, a few left-wingers ever get put in the dock, in about eighty years, the New York Museum of History will be celebrating their courage and deploring the loss of their artistic input into the 21st century. All they’ll need to complete proof of the wicked injustice done to them is another contemporaneous, loud-mouthed, hard-drinking Irishman to blame, denounce and destroy…

What? WHO?

Kevin Myers is an Irish journalist, author and broadcaster. He has reported on the wars in Northern Ireland, where he worked throughout the 1970s, Beirut and Bosnia.